S. PERRY - The Heretic’s Mark

Galileo gets to his feet. He peers at Nicholas in the torchlight, trying to read his face. ‘You’re serious, aren’t you?’

‘Never more so.’

‘What sort of danger?’

‘Of murder.’

‘You’re still fretting about that, are you? I told you before, no one in this city would bother themselves making an affray upon my life. Apart from dear old Fabrici – and my creditors, of course.’ He frowns at his own reasoning. ‘But then what good would murdering me do them? You can’t get blood out of a stone, and you can’t get a dead man to pay his debts.’

‘The one you have to fear is the maid with the clever brain.’

‘Signorina Maas?’ Galileo says, astonished.

‘It was she who killed Matteo Fedele. Today she murdered the goldsmith, Bondoni. And she would have killed my wife, Bianca, too – had not Ruben here stopped her. I fear you and Bruno are next on her list.’

Galileo seems to chew the air as he digests what Nicholas has told him.

‘ Why? ’ he demands. ‘I have done her no harm. What does she want to murder me for?’

And then, out of the darkness from one of the tiers above, comes a woman’s voice, calling out in a guttural English.

‘Tell him, Nicholas. You understand the truth. You tell him why he must die.’

In the flickering torchlight, three heads move as one. Three pairs of eyes fix on the figure standing, barely visible, behind the wooden balustrade of the third tier. Hella Maas, dressed as plainly as a martyr at the stake, her hands away from her sides to grip the rail, leans out of the darkness as though intending to address an assembled crowd of loyal followers.

‘I think we should hear the justification from you, Hella,’ Nicholas answers. ‘Do not seek to make me complicit in your madness.’

‘I have to stop them, Nicholas,’ she cries out. ‘The curtain has to be drawn. The door has to be closed. We have let the Devil in too often. If we let him in again, there will be chaos. Judgement Day will be upon us all soon enough. The world must have a little peace before it does. A little rest. How else may we ready ourselves for what is coming?’

Nicholas jams his torch into the narrow gap between the dissection table and its surrounding rail, then climbs up onto the balustrade of the lower observation tier. He reaches out to steady himself against the edge of the tier above, his head tilted back so that he can look up directly into Hella’s face.

‘You are suffering a terrible malady of the soul, Hella. I understand that. But this insanity cannot continue. Come down and let your brother help you.’

Her head turns towards where Ruben stands with Galileo. ‘So the courage you found in the storehouse hasn’t deserted you yet, little brother,’ she says, a sad smile on her face. ‘You couldn’t help me after Breda, and you cannot help me now.’ She leans further out to look down at Nicholas. ‘Only you can help me,’ she says. ‘You, alone, can see a little of what is in my heart. No one else has that faculty.’ She looks puzzled as – beneath her – his face contorts with rejection. ‘You know I am right, Nicholas. Admit it.’

‘That I can see a little of what is in your heart?’ he replies contemptuously. ‘Did you really believe that killing my wife would help me to see more?’

‘She was in the way, Nicholas. She has been in the way since we met. Discard her.’

‘Discard her – for you? ’

‘This close to Judgement Day we have to make brave choices.’

Nicholas jumps back down from the rail. ‘Ruben, go to the doorway. Take the steps on the right; I’ll go left. Be careful. I think her mind is so disordered she might strike at either of us without even realizing she’s doing it.’ He turns to the mathematician. ‘Professor, you go to the Piazza del Santo. Tell the first of the Podestà’s night-watch you come across that we need help here. Tell him I fear the doge’s Master of the Spheres is in danger. Hurry!’

Perplexed, Galileo shakes his head. He seems to have sobered up rapidly. ‘Don’t you want me to stay and help? The maid knows me. Perhaps I may reason with her.’

‘There has been nothing resembling reason in that poor maid’s mind for a long while, Professor. And speaking of what is reasonable, getting yourself stabbed as a way of avoiding paying your sister’s dowry is not it.’

With a harsh laugh, the mathematician heads for the doorway, his body silhouetted there by the light of the brazier burning in the mist beyond.

Nicholas takes up the torch from where he planted it and follows him, taking the left-hand flight of wooden steps. Ruben takes the right.

Hemmed into the narrow space between the wall of the auditorium and the outside masonry, Nicholas begins the steep climb into the blackness. Shoulders hunched, he thrusts the torch out ahead of him, moving within its dancing sphere of light into an otherwise impenetrable cosmos.

He climbs the first flight and reaches a curved landing barely wide enough to allow him passage. To his left is an open space to enable the audience of students to spill out and fill the observation tier; to his right, the brickwork of the building’s shell. He hears movement on the tier above, the clatter of footsteps on timber. From the far side of the auditorium comes the sound of Ruben pleading with his sister to stay where she is.

Moving forward, he stumbles upon the next flight of stairs. He begins to climb once more. Again he hears movement above him, a desperate and doomed slithering of shoe leather on freshly planed timber. A crossbeam support left in place by the carpenters springs out of the darkness and almost brains him. And then, out of the wall to his left, Hella emerges.

‘Come with me, Nicholas,’ she says in a pleading voice, holding out her hand, staring at him in the torchlight. ‘Come with me and we will find our rest together, before the last day.’

Turning her back on him, she hurries ahead. He catches a shadowy glimpse of her climbing the next flight of steps. Then he loses her again in the pitch-black confinement of this seemingly never-ending prison.

He does not count the tiers they climb together in this strange pursuit. But then suddenly there are no more steps, just an opening to his left. He turns to face it and steps forward.

By the light of the torch, Nicholas sees he is standing on the very top tier, looking out into space. There is no wooden balustrade here, only an elliptical, uncompleted walkway of planking held up by scaffolding. Two steps forward and he would go over the edge. He feels the unsecured planks move under his feet. Looking down, he sees glimpses of the tiers of the auditorium set out beneath him, as though he were peering over the edge of an elliptical stairwell, forty or more feet down into the darkness. A faint, single wash of yellow from the brazier in the courtyard falls on the now-empty dissection table. He feels his knees weaken, his stomach lurch. His free hand clutches at the wall in a bid to stop the reeling of his senses.

From his right he hears the rasp of planks raking against each other. Turning his head, he catches a glimpse of Hella lunging towards him, her arms outstretched to carry them both over the edge. She moves so quickly, so suddenly, that he doesn’t even think of stepping back out of the way. He closes his eyes and waits to feel the brief moment of fatal freedom as he falls.

The night rings to the sharp crack and clatter of un-nailed planks sprung out of place by the impact of careless feet. A scream. A sickening glissando of impacts as Hella’s body strikes the rails of the lower tiers as it plunges. A final crack – mercifully brief – of a human skull striking the unyielding edge of the dissection table.